The Harbourfront Centre’s innovative production of small metal objects, staged at the Eaton Centre, uses daytime shoppers as unknowing extras. The audience sits in a box perched on the mall’s top level, and listens through headphones to the actors—who are miked with almost invisible microphones—as they perform amongst the crowd.
The production is staged by Back to Back Theatre, a bold Australian group that creates theatre with people who are perceived to have intellectual disabilities. The plot is purposefully very thin, but involves the collision of two pairs of people from vastly different worlds. Steve (Simon Laherty) and Gary (played in drag by Sonia Teuben, who, like Laherty, has an intellectual disability) are two friends living on the margins of life, alone except for each other.
They’re at the mall to sell drugs to Allen (Jim Russell) and Caroline (Caroline Lee), a sharp-dressing corporate couple, but things hit a snag when Steve has some kind of meltdown and refuses to move from the middle of the concourse. Allen and Caroline clearly believe that because Steve and Gary are disabled they can be dominated, and try increasingly crass methods of closing the deal.
Small metal objects is supposed to draw our attention towards the people whose lives we usually ignore. For the first 10 minutes, no actors can be seen. Rather, Steve and Gary’s intimate conversation is heard through the babble of the crowd, a wonderful illustration of the personal dramas all around us that go unnoticed. The most powerful part comes when Steve has his breakdown and freezes in the midst of the bustling crowd, his tiny wizened frame stiff in a pose of contained but obvious distress. Shoppers walk right by. Some take a glance back, but no one thinks to ask if he’s OK.
But in drawing our attention to these marginalized characters, the play forces the audience to ignore people around us. Pretty soon after the play begins, the shoppers realize something’s up. And out of interest, or maybe out of a vague sense of being excluded from the proceedings, they start to do annoying things. They stick their faces around the corner of seating area and say things like “Hey, are you watching a play?” One group of teenagers actually wandered into the middle of the performance, trying to find out which of the crowd were actors. This is, to say the least, distracting, and forces the audience to shut out many of the people around them, an action that the play is supposed to question.
It could be that the play’s “devisors” anticipated our reaction to these distractions, and are trying to get us to think about why we shut out the people in our everyday lives. But unfortunately, the real drama ends up coming not from the plight of the compelling characters, but from the constant sense that some jackass is going to run up and push them over in the middle of a line
